Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “lost his way” as a leader and, along with Palestinian leaders and some Israeli officials, has become an obstacle in achieving peace in Israel and Gaza.
In a March 14 speech on the Senate floor, Schumer, a lifelong Brooklynite, mourned the Israelis killed and taken hostage during Hamas’ Oct. 7 and the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza.
“After five months of suffering on both sides of this conflict, our thinking must turn — urgently — to how we can achieve lasting peace, and ensure prosperity and security for both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people in the Middle East,” Schumer said.
The senator recalled listening to coverage of the 1967 Six-Day War on the radio in the library of James Madison High School, “wondering if Israel would be pushed into the sea.”
“What Israel has meant to my generation, within living memory of the Holocaust, is impossible to measure,” he said. “The flowering of the Jewish people in the desert from the ashes of the Holocaust, and the fulfillment of the dream of a Jewish homeland — after nearly two thousand years of praying and waiting — represents one of the most heartfelt causes of my life.”
It was that longtime support and love for Israel that drove the senator to speak out on the most pressing threats to peace in the Middle East, Schumer said, as the war in Gaza drags on.
Hamas’ attack, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis, was “brutal beyond imagination,” he said, and reawakened long-held anxieties in Jewish communities around the world. He said he has supported the Biden administration in its negotiations to free the remaining 130 hostages in Israel, and urged Hamas to accept the most recently-proposed ceasefire deal.
“My heart also breaks at the loss of so many civilian lives in Gaza,” he said. “I am anguished that…
Read the full article here
